Random Ramblings About Making Games and Stuff from Cloud

Posts tagged ‘List box Item’

I recently started playing with around with Windows Phone 7 devkit and found it to be surprisingly productive tool set. I managed to develop a simple app within couple of weekends with almost zero previous knowledge on WP7 programming. I learned a couple of things on the way and wanted to tell them to you.

What I did was I started with installing Expression Blend, Visual Studio 2010 and WP7 SDK. I made UI using Blend and did the coding with Visual Studio. Benefits of this were near WYSIWYG experience with WP7 UI and no broken XAML during development.

Use system styles in text boxes PhoneForeground etc. So if user changes the phone theme your app will do the same.

DO NOT apply system styles to list boxes! It will break selected styles. Adjust the font size and font or make you own styles that only change font and font size. Otherwise you will spend time on implementing list box selected item visualization.

BIND UI to data. Seriously this will help a lot. You should not assign data to UI components. All my weird UI bugs where data is not updating where result of not doing the BIND correctly.

Test BIND working on your data periodically. This is because you want BINDING to work.

Make your data implement data as INotifyPropertyChanged change so that when data changes it automatically changes on UI.